“To call Steven Heller the most widely-published design writer and editor on the planet would still be selling the man short. True, he is a regular contributor to more than a dozen visual culture magazines like Eye and Print. Yes, he’s the editor of AIGA’s authoritative graphic design journal VOICE. And he has authored more than 100 books about design, illustration, and photography…”

“Ever since Adaptive Path moved into its current location several years ago, we’ve been updating the industrial space to better reflect how we use it and how we work. Which is to say, spaces for raging parties with hundreds of people to intimate places for individuals to cry in (’The Crying Room’). And whiteboards. Lots of whiteboards. Last year, we rennovated the upstairs space, creating a second floor for conference rooms and creative space. One room that was created, however, was quite large–almost too large. It wasn’t inviting to work there; it was like brainstorming in an airline hangar. Enter our patient, brilliant architects, Bruce Tomb and Tanja Pink.”

“Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, currently in beta, is Adobe’s newest tool for importing, managing, developing, and printing digital images. On January 19 I spoke with Mark Hamburg, Adobe Fellow, former Photoshop architect, and founder of the Lightroom project. Mark has been working on digital imaging at Adobe Systems Incorporated since 1990 and is currently driving the development of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.” (Thanks Daring Fireball!)

“Search for music by singing or humming part of a song. All you need is a microphone.”

“Late last year, in my predictions post for 2007, I mentioned something I called, quite uninventively, ‘Blog 2.0.’ More specifically I wroteL ‘10. “Blog 2.0′ will become a reality. By this I mean that Version 1.0 blogsites, of which I think Searchblog is a good example, will begin to look dated and fade in comparison to sites that employ better approaches to content management, navigation, intelligent widgets and web services, etc.’”

“Almost everyone knows at least one painting by Vincent van Gogh, but most likely no one knows them all. With this poster you’ll get a complete overview of van Gogh’s life. The complete 870 paintings are scaled proportionally and listed chronologically. So you’re invited to discover Vincent van Gogh on your own. You can see his changing favourite colour moods, motive series and recurring themes. When did he paint the famous sunflowers? And when the nightcafé?” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“This is the challenge: record an album in 28 days, just because you can. That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape. It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days…”

“Why does it matter which form of encoding we choose? What happens if we choose the ‘wrong’ one? The choice of character encoding affects the range of literal characters we can use in a web page. Regular Latin letters are rarely a problem, but some languages need more letters than others, and some languages need various diacritical marks above or below the letters. Then, of course, some languages don’t use Latin letters at all. If we want proper — as in typographically correct — punctuation and special symbols, the choice of encoding also becomes more critical.”

“Edward Saenz, principal of Gravity Branding, has worked with tons of organizations and companies to come up with product names and marketing insights. He came up with the name ‘WiFi’ and several of Nissan’s truck names, for instance. Here we visit him in his home office to get some insights into the rough and tumble world of product naming.”

This would probably be a useful reference for illustrators: “See how people live across the world! Explore the variety of lifestyles and cultural peculiarities! Normal Room shows you interior design and home furniture from all around the globe. Search our image database and explore the differences and similarities in architecture and home decoration between people in different countries.”

“Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project. All of us at the Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.”

“I use both digital and film cameras all the time. They each serve a different purpose… Most people get better results with digital cameras. I prefer the look of film. Film takes much more work. Extremely skilled photographers can get better results on film if they can complete the many more steps from shot to print all perfectly. Because there are so many ways things can go wrong with making prints from film, especially from print (negative) film, beginning photographers and hobbyists usually get better prints from digital because there are fewer variables to control.”

“On a rainy Wednesday in Redmond, Washington, 14 invited bloggers and industry leaders gathered at building 20 of the Microsoft campus for a full day of discussion regarding Microsoft’s outreach to its communities via the upcoming MIX07 conference. The very interesting and productive meeting was topped off with an hour spent with none other than Bill Gates, during which we had the fantastic opportunity to discuss issues of concern to the industry.”

“As no military plan survives contact with the enemy, no design concept survives contact with the client. Both situations feature laboriously (if not lovingly) crafted plans blown away by reality. The endgames differ in that designers define victory as gaining that initial approval.”

“Expanding the number of options often comes at the cost of finding solutions. Nowhere is this trend more evident than online—and the stakes have never been higher. Increasingly, our most significant decisions—such as whether or not to have a medical procedure or how to best to plan for retirement—are being made using web-based applications. As it turns out, many are poorly suited to helping us sort through the ever-growing range of possibilities. So why do these interfaces so often fail us when we need them most? And what unique challenges are there in designing systems that help us make high-stakes decisions?”